media releases - 2012 Eski'a Mphahlele Annual Memorial Lecture

2012 Eski’a Mphahlele Annual Memorial Lecture to explore the role of technology in democracy    

Is the fate of deliberative and participatory democracy bound with our understanding of technology and to what extent?

Distinguished African scholar and Chairperson of the National Library of South Africa, Professor Muxe Nkondo will delve into this topic when he delivers the keynote address at the 2012 Eski’a Mphahlele Annual Memorial Lecture to be held on Friday, 14 September 2012.

The memorial lecture, held in honour of esteemed educationist , author and African intellectual, the late Professor Eski’a Mphahlele, will be held under the theme : ‘The African Writer as a Prophet and Social Critic in Contemporary Times’.

In his address, titled ‘Designing Policy for Technical Democracy: What African Governments Should Do’, Professor Nkondo will explore how, with the information networks and the environmental movement now in the lead, technology has now entered the expanding democratic circle.

“Technology has become the medium of daily life in modern African society. Every major technical change reverberates at many levels, be it economic, social, religious, political or cultural’, he argues.

The media is invited to the memorial lecture. The details are as follows:

Date                 :           Friday, 14 September 2012

Time                 :           17:30 for 18:00

Venue               :           The Ranch, Protea Hotel,

Hollandsrift Farm, R101

Polokwane            

Enquiries: Mr George Dire – 0729239377 or Bessie Molokomme – 0825677607.

Profile of Professor Muxe Nkondo

A student of literature, Professor Muxe Nkondo believes that institutions of learning, while they must transmit technically exploitable knowledge, must at the same time cultivate that higher sensibility and moral imagination one finds in the arts at their best.  Currently in education, there is remarkable growth in technical skill, but there is no necessary connection between the increase in means and bringing about of the goal they exist to serve: a caring and cohesive society.  As a lecturer at the University of the North, and later at Harvard, Oxford and Vassar College; and recently as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Venda and Chairperson of several policy think tanks, he insisted that it was futile to think that society could be transformed without a conception of what it is to be human, and without a faith in the moral imagination, and without an educational system to support this faith.  And it is in the sources of this faith that there has been in our society a severe distortion and disorientation.  It is this faith that drove him, as it did Steve Biko, to join the legal team that defended the leadership of the South African Student Organization when they were accused of allegedly using Black Consciousness arts to instigate a rebellion in the mid-seventies.  Recently, this faith inspired him to develop analytical frameworks for Limpopo and Eastern Cape Liberation Heritage Routes.  Next to conduct, nothing gives more intimate testimony to the quality of a people’s culture than their appreciation of the arts.

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